


Never could get the hang of Thursdays

by Amemait



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: GFY, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-02-24 15:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2586878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amemait/pseuds/Amemait
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Interdepartmental cooperation leads to the ongoing use of Muggle pens and the discovery of a serial killer. It's the latter of these that leads Harry to Draco Malfoy's doorstep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never could get the hang of Thursdays

**Author's Note:**

> To: Community  
> Rating: PG-13  
> Warnings: * Crime drama level description of after-the-fact gore *  
> Story notes: Unnamed character deaths. Somebody has cancer but is still alive at the end of it. Divorce happened. The not-too-distant future awaits.  
> Disclaimer: Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.  
> Betaed by: This-girl-is  
> Author's Note: I wish I had shoehorned in police notebooks. Spot the Sherlock cameo.

“She wasn’t killed here.”

That sounded a bit certain to Harry, but he wisely kept silent while the muggleborn SOCO looked over the area.

“What makes you say that?”

The SOCO stood, unconsciously smoothing down her white overalls as she did so, before she turned to look at Harry’s liaison, a slightly older Detective Inspector who could have passed for Kingsley Shacklebolt’s younger sister.

“No blood spatter, anywhere. Nothing the luminol’s picking up, and nothing the spells are finding either. No sign of any shielding to catch it or scourgify cast to get rid of it either, and believe me, in this alley? You would absolutely know if scourgify had been cast. It was the same with the other body. Killed up close – we can tell that from the gunshot residue – by a pistol, but not where the body was found. Clothes stripped off and burned, looks like it was lit the normal way too, no magic involved, or the first responders wouldn’t have been able to put it out at the first body. Wand missing.” The SOCO stretched. “The initial muggle autopsy, before you took over the case, said she would have died at seven AM. We’ve got eyewitnesses saying this place was empty then.”

“They’ve identified the first victim. Angela Langford, Muggleborn American. Most of the paperwork we had for her was from her applying for her work visa about a month ago. We’re looking for an Oak wand with Unicorn Hair,” Harry said. “I’ll let you know when we’ve got any information on this one.”

“Two victims, same MO. Both definitely magical, but killed through non-magical means?” Inspector Bailey shook her head, visibly annoyed. “Honestly, Auror Potter. We go through how many years without needing much interdepartmental interference, and then a month after we do, we get two murders? I thought this was just going to be more of the usual petrificus totallus robbery types we’d be working to catch and prevent, not murders.”

“I don’t think they’re trying to justify it,” Harry murmured. “Who says there wouldn’t have been a different sort of catalyst for this anyway?”

“Boss, you’re just worried about having to do more paperwork again.” Harry smiled grimly at the SOCO’s attempt to lighten the mood. “Look, if you’re both done with your visit, then I’ll get back to checking for prints the normal way. Maybe there’s something I’ve missed. Auror Potter, if you could get the spells so this scene isn’t disturbed?”

“Yeah.” Harry held out his wand and muttered the spells. Bailey had a damn good point there. One month and there had already been two murders in that time?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bailey growled, following him out, her coat pulled about her like a substitution for robes. Maybe it was.

“Doubt it, my Occlumency has really improved since I was sixteen.”

Bailey snorted. “Laugh it up, fuzzball. Look, two dead in a month through non-magical means?” She didn’t have to say more.

Harry sighed heavily. “Or they could both be co-incidence.”

“My office bookkeeper doesn’t know the exchange rate on knuts.”

“No bet,” Harry agreed. “You’ll check your files and I’ll check mine?”

“Ours will take longer,” Bailey warned.

“No they won’t, lying wench, you have a computer system with search functionality. We have a library and a filing system with attitude.” And how Harry hated that filing system.

“Between that and pens it’s a wonder anybody bothers to stick with the Aurors.”

“We just implemented pens, we’ll get around to Windows 7 later.”

“Eight,” Bailey corrected, heading off in the other direction.

*

Six hours later, and the news wasn’t good.

“We have five more people reported missing in that area in the last three months alone. All different ages, different jobs, different careers, friends, the only thing linking them is a very general geography.” Pictures waved cheerfully out from their photographs, where Harry had set them on the board.

“And we,” Bailey picked up where Harry left off, placing the unmoving muggle photos of crime scenes up on the board beneath each photo, “have five until-now-unidentified bodies found by the normal police services. No ID, no missing persons report filed matching their description with the local police services. Each body found in different areas across the city, each killed somewhere else in the same way, each of them laid out in the same way. So far the only difference is that they were all found at different times of day, and killed at different times of day. We’ve got Estimated Times of Deaths ranging from two-thirty PM to seven AM. All of them were killed on a Thursday.” She added a pin to each point where the bodies had been found with a wave of her wand. Another wave drew a line of string between each point, tying itself to the other two pins on the board.

“The same way as the two we knew about this morning,” Bailey went on, as though the silent wand work hadn’t taken a little out of her. “New Scotland Yard were looking at these bodies previously, but the officers and one of the consultants involved have had their minds obliviated.”

“One of?” Daphne asked.

“None of us want a repeat of the Tea And Biscuits incident,” Harry clarified. A few people around the room shuddered. “Seven victims so far. Only links are that they’re killed by muggles- ”

“Or killed using muggle methods,” The Inspector interrupted. Harry nodded at her.

“Or using muggle methods,” he amended. “We’ve no ideas about the why for the killer’s arrangements, only that whoever it is, is good enough to kill them using muggle methods at close range, then transport them using muggle methods, and not leave a damn trace.”

“The way the bodies are laid out, the fact that their wands are taken and how they’re moved… We could be looking at a ritualistic killing here,” Daphne suggested, her nose wrinkling the way it did when something bad had occurred to her.

“Daph?” Harry paused, looking at her.

“I was just thinking about the only person who’d have the resources for us to look up, to see if it’s a ritual gone horribly wrong.”

“Okay, go to it then-” Harry began, then cut off as Daphne shook her head again.

“I can’t. I mean, he’d probably talk to me and everything, but he might ask after Astoria…”

Harry stared, pieces falling into place (which was more than he could say for the case so far). “You’re saying somebody should go and talk to Draco Malfoy about borrowing some of his dad’s old books?”

Bailey looked around. “This sounds like a bad idea to me. Anybody else? Bad idea?”

“It’s a good start but it can’t be our only start. I’ll do that though. Okay, other ideas here people. What if it’s a muggle?”

“Do we get one of those whatchamacallits. Psychological profilers in?” Tamworth blinked as every eye fell on him. “My wife’s a muggle and addicted to Criminal Minds and Wire in the Blood?”

Bailey rolled her eyes. “Tell her to get into The Body Farm and leave the psychological profiling shows alone. Back in real life, profilers have about as much of a hit and miss rate as untrained muggle psychics. No, if it turns out it’s a muggle going after wizards, there’s a procedure in place for it. We obliviate whoever it is, then turn him over to the muggle authorities.” She winced. “Normal authorities,” she added under her breath. “In this case, we obliviate the knowledge of the wizards but not of the crime, and send the person to New Scotland Yard.”

“All right. Tamworth, Greengrass, I want you two on our missing persons reports. Make sure they’re the same people, before you go door knocking with the news. Standard procedure though, we’re doing all we can, we don’t know how they died or why, what we don’t need is anti-muggle sentiment.” Harry rubbed the scar on his forehead still on his forehead quickly. “The rest of you, I want you over the muggle reports. Nothing leaves this room, am I clear?”

A silent chorus of nods. How precisely was this his life?

“Inspector?”

“Allow me to guess, Auror Potter? Go back to normal London?”

Harry shook his head. “Almost. Go back to muggle London and run your own people, see if anybody saw anything out on the streets. One wizard dead through muggle means, that’s strange. Seven of them is a serial killer on an extraordinarily fast schedule. I hate to override what your usual work was going to be, but…”

“But seven dead is still seven dead and we should try to prevent it becoming eight. Got you.” Bailey tucked her wand back into its sleeve holster, where most wouldn’t think to look for such a thing. “I’ll catch a floo out from the main floor?”

“Use my office,” Harry offered instead. “Merlin knows I barely do.”

“Thanks.” She gave him a grin, nodded at his team, and headed on out.

And now to deal with his blond archenemy.

*

“We need them for a case, Draco.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you need to borrow my books, Potter.”

But Draco backed away from the door anyway. The Malfoys hadn’t had a house elf since Dobby had warned the rest of them off the family before his death, but Harry wasn’t sure if it was habit or invitation on Draco’s part that he left the door open as he did so.

He settled on invitation.

“Draco, it’s for a good cause.”

“What sort of case is it? Or has Weasley Senior finally realised that he’s in over his head in the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts department and snapped, declaring that books shouldn’t be magical either?”

Harry ignored the slight against his former father-in-law. Arthur Weasley had been overjoyed at the idea of working cooperatively with muggle departments, and had put off retirement another year for the opportunity to build some real SOPs for it.

“Little bitter today, Draco?” he went for mild.

“Anniversary,” Draco growled, stalking down the hall to the library. Harry winced. Oh. And Daphne hadn’t mentioned either.

“I’m sorry. I could come back another time-” Harry started, but Draco cut him off.

“Why did you leave her, Harry?”

Harry froze. He’d known how it had looked at the time. The perfect couple, the hero and his heroine wife, separating. He got the kids half the time when they weren’t at school, and he’d insisted on them going to muggle primary school as well – he’d started a fashion for that for a little while too, particularly with the parents of squibs.

The fallout from the separation – and later divorce – had been… it had been bad. They’d kept things as quiet as they could, but it seemed that one of the few absolute constants in the life of Harry James Potter, was celebrity gossip magazines.

And even though it had been mutual, almost amicable even… it still hurt to think Ginny’s name.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Draco,” Harry replied, voice cold. In the reflection shown in the glass front of a display case just outside the library doors, Draco shrugged.

“It was merely a question, Harry. I don’t particularly care, and I’m certainly not going to sell the story. I think of all people, we can both appreciate the desire to keep some little rumours away from the press. But…”

“But?” Harry stepped forward and half-turned, tired of seeing only Draco Malfoy’s reflection.  
Draco smiled.

“But I always thought it was a shame, that was all. You and she… matched each other. Like two halves of a soul. Tori- Astoria and I never really had that.”

That statement was getting a little too close to the truth, frankly. “Daphne’s always been circumspect about that, if you were under the impression that your former sister-in-law had aired out all of your dirty laundry for the department.”

Draco snorted. “Daffodil wouldn’t do that anyway.” He shrugged, and for a moment the years they’d been through since Hogwarts settled on his face. “I just… somebody else to talk to? About it?” Another moment, and Draco shook his head. “Too much. Sorry.” He reached out a hand, obscuring Harry’s own reflection in the cabinet’s glass as the Auror turned to watch him opening the door. “Tori used to say I apologised too much, or not enough,” Draco added. “Let me know if I’m doing that please. But you’re here for a case of some kind, yes?”

“Um, yeah,” Harry blinked a few times, letting his mind catch up again. He was here for a case. That was it. “Daphne thought we ought to consult your books about Rituals?”

“You’re here for rituals?” Draco blinked in shock. “Thing is though, ritual magic isn’t exactly what people think it is.” Draco drew out a small book from the cabinet, and took in Harry’s raised-eyebrow-expression. “I’m serious here, Potter.”

“No, I realise that. What’s the book for?”

Draco glanced down at it in surprise. “So I can record which books you’re borrowing.”

“I can just give you a receipt, you know-” Harry began, and Draco rolled his eyes.

“Yes, Potter, I’m sure you could. But this book is the book that keeps track of where the other books are, and if you’re going to be leaving the building with any of these, it needs to know.”

Like the Marauder’s Map, Harry found himself musing.

“-ical libraries, particularly the personal ones and are you even listening to me?”

“Sorry,” Harry came back. He hadn’t wool-gathered like that in years either. “I think I just worked out where the Marauders got the idea for their map.”

Draco fixed him with a stare from those shockingly pale blue eyes of his, then sighed. “Right. Well. Do keep up.”

“So what do you mean that rituals don’t…” Harry trailed off. What was he, eleven and not even started Hogwarts yet, or over forty and head of the Aurors?

“Don’t work the way people think they do? Easy.” Draco pressed his thumb to the doorhandle. It opened quietly. “People think that rituals are all about blood. Or herbs. Or the kinds of wood you use in a fire. That sort of thing. They’re really not.”

“What are they about then?” Harry asked, thinking of a graveyard and a knife.

“Most of them don’t work. At least, not the way they’re meant to.” Draco waved a hand, then climbed up one of the ladders to get to a higher book. “Sometimes, I think the authors of most of them were utterly blasted on Firewhiskey and wrote whatever the hell came to mind as something to try, and made up a result for it after they failed to achieve anything at all.”

“I’ve seen one work,” Harry murmured the reminder. Draco grunted.

“One day, Potter, I’m going to get both of us rousingly drunk, and we are going to discuss things like wives, lives, and that ritual you were around for and don’t like discussing. It would have to be the first one that’s worked in a few centuries, and a good library really ought to be complete. Any idea of what I’m looking for?”

“I thought you knew what you were getting?” Harry asked staring up at Draco from the base of the ladder.

“I’m disabling one of the failsafes. It’s meant to alert people when books are being stolen. And keep Scorpius from getting near them in the first place. I don’t usually look at what we’re looking for, I don’t think I’ve had this turned off since… well, since just before Scorpius was born, and Tor- Astoria and I ran around childproofing the whole house.”

“…Really?”

“Really.” Draco jumped down the ladder as though he’d been doing that same movement since he was five. Probably to the disdain of Lucius Malfoy. “What kind of ritual?”

“The kind…” Harry hesitated, then winced. If he was going to get the information he needed accurately and quickly, he’d need to trust. And Draco Malfoy, it was widely acknowledged, had the best collection of ritual books in England, it wasn’t as though he could go to anywhere else and get the information he needed. “The kind where it might require muggle means to kill wizards?”

Draco stared. “You have got to be joking.”

“I wish I were.”

“Just the one?” Harry winced, and cursed that he’d never really learned a good poker face like Shacklebolt had. Draco kept staring. “More than one? Merlin’s beard, Harry James Potter, you don’t do things by halves do you? Give me a number here, so I can start narrowing this search down.”

“Seven.”

Draco shut his eyes.

“I need you to keep this a secret, Draco-”

“Yes, I can bloody well see that, thanks,” Draco snapped. “Right now I’m seeing a return to Voldemort policies otherwise.”

“Precisely.”

“Muggle means? Or by an actual muggle?” Perceptive already.

“We don’t know. No wands left behind – though once we know who the person is, that’s not too hard to look up; no scourgify of the scenes, no priori incantatum, we’ve got nothing to go on except that they’ve all been laid out the same way and they weren’t killed where they were found.” Harry explained. “Daphne suggested coming to see you.”

“Daffodil would,” Draco grumbled. “Stercus, Harry.”

“Yeah,” Harry answered. He’d heard enough of the word to know it was an expletive purebloods used, but that none of them would ever translate.

“No less than seven dead then” Draco snapped, all business. “Fine. What sort of timeframe am I looking at here?”

“Two months?” Harry winced.

“Have I mentioned I hate you?”

Harry smiled mirthlessly. “It may have come up once or twice, yeah.”

“Well, I’m saying it again then, because clearly I haven’t said it recently enough or often enough for it to stick. I hate you, Potter.” Draco muttered something under his breath that might have been ‘Perfect Potter’, and had this been any other moment Harry might have laughed aloud, because he’d heard twelve-year-old Draco Malfoy repeat that to his father a few times, much to Lucius’ distaste.

“You hate me but you’re going to work with me on this right?” Harry had to check.

“Yes, fine, I’ll work with you and your department on this. I’m going to need research time though. Come back in a few hours with pictures of what I’m looking for. Stercus.”

Harry hesitated. Draco looked stressed, suddenly. “Why a few hours?”

“I have to start pulling out the obscure sacrifice stuff. The ones that might actually stand a chance at working as well as the ones that really don’t. One of the locks takes a while to get through, and we’ll need the pictures to compare it with. Go. And don’t forget to check for which House they were in, that might be important!”

*

“Auror Potter, do you have any comment on the recent disappearances?”

Second only to the constancy of celebrity gossip magazines in the life of Harry James Potter, there were the ever-dreaded actual newspapers. Sometimes, those could be far worse.  
The celebrity gossip magazines didn’t usually try to accost him in the Ministry hallway, for example.

“Please refer to my office for any official statements on ongoing and active cases,” Harry replied, pushing through the throng which had somehow surrounded the floo he’d come through in moments.

For a method of travel which had been theoretically developed to keep the comings and goings of witches and wizards in the muggle middle ages secret, floo travel was enormously public. It was only that Malfoy Manor had anti-apparition wards up that meant he’d had to use the thing, and frankly he wished he’d gone straight for his office instead.

“Auror Potter, would you care to comment on-”

“No.”

“Mister Potter, what do you think of the rising call for squib education in the wizarding world, post your revolutionary approach to the early education of your own children?”

Now that one, Harry would stop for. “Mister Buchanan, isn’t it?”

“Yessir.”

“Right. I think that squib education is a very worthy cause. Frankly, I think it’s appalling that it hasn’t occurred sooner. Had mandatory education for all – not just for those of us who can wave a wand and say a few words safely, but for everybody – been available, then Merope Gaunt might not have used a love potion to force a young muggle to marry her, and the world would never have met Tom Riddle. Education saves lives.”

“So you agree that Hogwarts should be opening its doors to people with less to no magical power, as well as individuals with your own power levels?” Buchanan looked almost dizzy with the thrill of getting an interview.

“I think that Headmaster Longbottom is doing a marvellous job and that Hogwarts has flourished under his tutelage. But Hogwarts should not be the only standard of schooling. Magical instruction can be dangerous, but education as a whole should not be based entirely on magic.”

“And if a squib wants to learn magic nonetheless?” Buchanan pressed. Harry blinked.

“A squib should learn all they can about the world we live in,” he settled on. Buchanan looked annoyed, but Harry nodded at him all the same, clamping down hard on his own annoyance at having his friend’s stewardship over the castle impugned. “Thank you,” he finished, and walked off to another chorus of ‘Auror Potter!’s following him down the hall to the elevator. Harry’s newly formed bad mood followed him all the way into the office.

“Morning, sir.”

“Is it?” Harry growled, stalking in and throwing his case onto the desk.

“It’s morning sir, I made no comment about whether this was a good or bad thing.” Bones handed him her report. “Potions came back. They’ve all got traces of something that looks like it might be a potion in them, but we’ve no idea what it is or where they got the recipe, and it seems all the ingredients are things muggles could easily get their hands on with a walk through the woods and access to a standard nature book.”

Harry shut his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose and wondered, not for the first time, why he’d taken this job. Sure, it had seemed like the right thing to do, but frankly sometimes he just wanted to retire and take up a teaching position somewhere. Maybe Hogwarts. Or Hendon at this rate.

He could feel Susan’s eyes staring through him, and she patted him on the shoulder gently. “Two sugars in your tea, sir?”

Harry opened his eyes. “How’d you guess?”

She laughed at him, an odd sound considering the morning’s contents, and bustled off to the teapot.

“And can we find out who broke the damn story?!” Harry called after her, then glared around the room, filled with witches and wizards who didn’t so much as glance up to meet his gaze.

“Come on people,” Harry shouted when nobody said a word. He practically stomped over to the map of greater London on the wall and running a finger over one of the pins in it. “We have seven dead magic users, each of them shot, each of them stripped naked – and there is no other way to say this, but laid out like a damn photographer’s glamour shot - with their clothes set alight with an everlasting flame charm, we’ve got all their wands stolen. And apparently this has been going on every Thursday for the last two months in this city. Right under our very noses and we didn’t notice. Who the hell is responsible?”

Susan was at his shoulder again, but wisely didn’t say a word, merely floated his (chipped, tea stained, ‘World’s Greatest Dad’) mug up to roughly elbow height between him and the map. He took a step back, snatching the mug from midair and trying to work out where the hell the pattern was.

*

The fireplace closest to the library of Malfoy Manor flared green, and deposited Harry James Potter, Head Auror, onto the floor in a sprawling heap, to the sound of a slow clap.

“Elegant as always, Potter.”

“Very funny, did you see where my glasses went?”

The blurry shape which was probably Draco Malfoy picked something up, made a face which was too blurry to be truly disgusted, and cast a quick scourgify.

“Why don’t you take a potion? Or there are plenty of advances in spells for these being made every day.”

Harry shrugged, fingers closing around the offered glasses. “I dunno. Never really seems like a good idea. For all the advances made daily, they don’t really strike me as safe. Some of the potions give you permanent motion sickness, and so forth.”

“Only as a very rare side-effect.” Draco rolled his no-longer-blurry eyes and held out another hand to help Harry up. “But you’re not here to discuss your eyes, are you. Come on, I’ve narrowed it down a little. We’ve got a good mix of ones that don’t work and ones that do to go over.”

“And by a good mix you mean?” Harry asked, accepting the hand up.

“Twelve all up. Six ones with dubious documentation suggesting that they work, and six which were probably made up for laughs. One of them has notes in the margin of my copy saying that it absolutely doesn’t work, but it was a good jape; I’ve only included that one because it fits in with the bodily positioning the best.”

“Thanks. I brought the latest files. Potions and toxins came back with a list of probable ingredients for what they might have ingested beforehand.”

“At last, a further connection,” Draco muttered, opening the library doors. “And what about my other suggestion?”

“House allegiance? Nope. The American attended and taught at Salem. We’ve got one body who went to Durmstrang, another to Beauxbatons. We’ve got two Gryffindors dead and two Hufflepuffs as well, but they were all in completely separate years – only two of them were even in the castle together, and that was for two years while one of the Hufflepuffs finished her sixth and seventh years and one of the Gryffindors started his first two.” Harry dusted himself off surreptitiously before following him into the library, then caught Draco’s glare. “What?”

Draco rolled his eyes again, pointing his wand at Harry. It took a lot for Harry not to flinch at the Hawthorn pointed at him. “Scourgify!”

That lifted the soot away, at least. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, the books might sulk if you touched them covered in soot like that.”

Harry grinned at that – then recalled the Restricted Section book which had screamed when he’d opened it, and decided it was possible Draco wasn’t joking overmuch. “Were you really expecting it to be a House thing?” he asked, keeping up with the blond easily.

“Not really. I thought maybe they might have been Ravenclaws, but it seems not.”

“Ravenclaws hardly strike me as the type to be caught up in whatever this is.”

“Don’t they?” Draco asked mildly, pulling out a chair for Harry in front of a pile of books, bookmarks bristling from every angle of them.

“Were you up all night doing this?” Harry asked in shock. Draco shrugged.

“Not quite. But I did think Ravenclaws, when you first outlined it to me. Or maybe a Ravenclaw killer. There’s not many people who’d have access to these kinds of books to work anything out, but five out of these books were written by Ravenclaws.”

“You have got to be joking. Even if it was in the House’s nature not to think, any Ravenclaw I’ve known-”

“You know, perceptions of the Houses change,” Draco interrupted. “A hundred years ago, people mistrusted the Ravenclaws more than Slytherins. Before that, people feared the Gryfffindors.” Draco ran a finger down the spine of the nearest book, considering. “Hufflepuffs, before even then. It was a great dishonour to be a badger.”

“Why? They work hard, they usually-”

Draco turned, tipping his head slightly. “They usually what? There was a time when Hufflepuffs were known for obedience and diligence in that. They would follow leaders, without fear or question, into darkness and abyss. Then, they said, at least the Serpents think for themselves. The Lions were known for causing death as they walked – King Richard the Lionheart went to war and lost many of his men and many called it a victory. The wizards called him that first because they saw in him a fool who was so obsessed with the perception of his own bravery that he forgot others were going to die for him. Ravenclaws are intelligent, and they were greatly feared. Born a hundred and fifty years before, Luna Lovegood would never have been bullied as she was; she would have been too feared.”

Harry’s breath caught in this throat.

“I didn’t want to be feared. But I suppose I feared what my parents would say if I weren’t in Slytherin. Ravenclaw, they could have perhaps accepted. But the hat looked into my mind, and saw my fear, and shouted Slytherin to the world before I could think another word.”

“You smiled when you were sorted into Slytherin,” Harry reminded him.

Draco looked back down. “I was eleven. That was before I became aware I might have had any other choice.”

Harry thought of the Slytherins who’d fled the castle, at the end. Nearly all of them when questioned had whispered that whichever side won, they would lose. Not wanting to be one of Voldemort’s get, but fearing dying by their classmates’ wands.

Draco had stayed, of course, but had he been given much choice in that?

“Peter Pettigrew was a Gryffindor,” Draco added, looking back up sharply. “Don’t discount any possibility in this, Harry.”

And wasn’t that just the first lesson he’d learned as an Auror – the first lesson he tried to teach anybody he trained – being thrown back at him?

Harry nodded, mouth dry at Draco’s stare. “Yeah. Guess you’ve got a point.”

*

The disappearance story breaking was one thing entirely.

The disappearance story being linked to the additional disappearance of an eighteen year old Ravenclaw who’d been home visiting her sick muggle father when she disappeared between her home and the train station, was something else entirely. Harry fought his way through the throng of press, ignoring Buchanan this time, and thought longingly of sending somebody else out to do the inevitable press statement later.

All this in just a few days, since they’d actually made the damn connection in the case that should have been started ages ago – had it really been so long? It felt like more, it felt like less.

His meeting with the Minister had been short and to the point. It had also not gone very well. He had a meeting with Neville to look forward to later that day, although the subject matter was going to be far less pleasant than their usual ‘little chats’, as Neville called them.

“How the hell did they find out?”

“Probably paying attention to the usual school gossip networks?” Susan suggested, not even looking up as Harry slammed the door behind him. “Tea’s on the tray beside your door, Bailey’s waiting in your office.”

“Damn.” Harry wasn’t sure if he meant the DI’s visit or the school gossip network he’d once lamented as a teenager.

“Yes, I’ll just bet you forgot that too,” Susan said, clearly deciding he meant the meeting. She prodded one of the pages with her wand and sighing. “Not even their wands are the same. Similar cores, of course, but eight different kinds of woods and sizes,” she muttered. “What the hell’s the connection?”

“If you figure it out, let me know. For now, treat the girl as a separate case, she’s so far outside the age group of the others as to hopefully be a new case all on her own. Maybe we might get lucky and she’ll turn up alive,” Harry finished, feigning hope.

“Sir,” Susan replied, separating the stack of files with another flick of her wand. Harry picked up his cup from the tray floating beside his door, and stepped into his office. “Please tell me you’ve got good news, Sally.”

DI Bailey snorted. “I’ve got the exact opposite. You remember there’re those power outages out in normal London?”

“Something to do with strikes?” Harry asked, heart sinking.

“Damaged wires and kids playing at making them worse you mean. We’ve got CCTV of her leaving the hospital in a taxi, then she hits a blackout area. We’re bringing her taxi driver in this morning.”

“Fantastic,” Harry sighed, picking up the first piece of paper. “Anything on him?”

“She doesn’t have any criminal history in normal London. We’ll process her the normal way for her Dad’s sake, then bring her in here if questioning gets us nowhere.”

“Yeah, all right. What’s… Ashleigh Carriger’s dad in hospital for?” Harry usually made an effort to remember their given names. Even if kids were the absolute hardest.

Some days here, he really felt sorry for Molly, whose boggart had come far too true for words.

Bailey looked at him in surprise. “Cancer. Liver, I believe, though I’d need to check the file.”

“I’ll swing by, get him checked in to St. Mungos,” Harry decided suddenly. “At this point, it’s the damn least we can do for him.”

Bailey regarded him in shock for a few seconds, then nodded. “All right sir. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Find out if anybody – and I do mean anybody – has been talking the damn press. Where are they getting their info from?”

“Can do, sir. Mr. Carriger’s hospital details are in the file. Apparently Ms Carriger had been starting that process herself; she’d been in and out of here for weeks.”

Harry nodded absently, trying to will away the tension headache. All they really needed now was a Slytherin to complete the set…

What was it Draco had said?

Don’t discount any possibility in this.

Huh.

“I’ll have somebody ask around. See if anybody knew her well from her visits here, or if anybody had been following her. Actually, I’ll just pull the visit list for the last couple of weeks.”

Bailey walked out, and Susan walked in. “Wand records officer, sir.”

“Huh? Oh! Right, yeah, the official paperwork.” So that they could post up rather important-looking signs about being on the lookout for stolen wands fitting this description. It was one thing to have the family’s reports on what the wands were, quite another to have the official records. Apparently. They always matched up, but apparently ‘procedure’.

“One birch/phoenix, eleven inches,” the records officer began without any preamble, laying down each official-looking piece of paper with wand image on Harry’s desk as though it had personally affronted him. “Rowan/dragon, twelve inches. Ash/unicorn, nine inches. Alder-”

“Elder?” Harry’s looked up in shock. The officer shook his head calmly.

“Alder, sir. As I was saying, Alder/phoenix, ten and a half inches. Willow/dragon, twelve inches. Oak/unicorn, nine and a half inches. Holly/phoenix, ten and a quarter inches.” The man sighed, looking older than Harry thought he was. “I don’t have the official page for the poor girl this morning yet, but she’s Hazel/dragon, eleven and three quarters. And I hope you find whoever’s doing this sir, I really do, because whoever it is needs to pay and be taught a good hard lesson in wandlore to boot.”

Harry nodded absently. “Nothing like Veela hair, then?”

“No, nothing particularly exotic, unless you want to count the Holly/phoenix, but different bird from yours sir. All Ollivander’s, except the American’s of course.”

Harry rubbed his forehead. “Thanks, Terry.”

“Any time. You catch the bastard, sir.”

“Your words of consideration are taken into account,” Harry replied, because ‘you catch the bastard, sir’ was the way Terrance Kettleburn finished all their conversations. He suspected that this was as much of a statement of continued good wishes as anything else.

Terry ducked out again.

*

This time when he landed on the slate tiles outside the doors to the Malfoy library, Harry’s shirt was torn from a run in with a peculiarly enthusiastic reporter. Draco raised an eyebrow at the damaged skin on his chest, but didn’t need to ask where it had come from.

“Sometimes I wonder why you don’t cover up those scars with something.”

“Like what?”

“Muggle makeup?” Draco took in Harry’s expression. “Mother used to wear it quite a bit, actually. She said it was one of the few things muggles had gotten right. That and indoor plumbing.”

Harry suppressed a giggle as he stood up and cast his own scourgify silently. “They’ve gotten other things pretty right as well you know.”

Draco looked at him. “Not answering my question.”

“Well. One of them, everybody can see. It’s a little pointless covering it up when I don’t need to for a specific reason, otherwise everybody would expect it to be me under the makeup when I do hide it. One of them,” Harry tapped his chest, right over the second horcrux scar, “is hidden under my shirt usually anyway.”

“And the one on your hand?” Draco asked.

Harry looked down. I will not tell lies. “Reminds me.”

“Reminds you?”

“Yeah. It reminds me that just because I don’t believe somebody, doesn’t mean they’re not telling the truth. Like Luna.”

“Huh. Hadn’t thought of it that way. Reparo that shirt of yours and we’ll get to it. Anything new?”

“Yeah. Looks like we’re adding the Ravenclaw girl to this too.”

“Eight?” Draco asked.

“Eight,” Harry confirmed. “Reparo!”

The shirt stitched itself untidily back together, to Draco’s obvious horror at the now certainly ruined shirt. But it would keep him warm and really that was the important part right now.

Draco shook his head, shutting his mouth and then shutting his eyes.

“One healer, one American Divination teacher trying to move here, one person working as a muggle undertaker, one minor musician, one beekeeper with clients in both worlds, one person working as a muggle builder, one unemployed person whose only real quality of note was that he was good at muggle javelin throwing, one student. Nothing to genuinely connect them except general geography.”

“Yeah,” Harry replied, leading the way into the library with Draco trailing after him this time, and taking a sip of the tea that hovered up on a tray to meet him by the table where they’d laid out their books. They knew these facts. “And squads working on that interdepartmental co-operation thing getting nowhere,” Harry yawned the last word, and Draco turned around to look at him.

“When did you last sleep?” The blond sounded suspicious. Harry shrugged.

“A while ago?”

“This is your off-duty time, isn’t it?”

“Draco, I’ve pulled all-nighters before-”

“A large number of the books in here are dangerous to handle when sleepy. Potter, you’re going to take a nap before we get any work done tonight.”

Harry yawned again- then froze in shock.

“Is there a sleeping draught in this?” it tasted just a little too good to be normal tea…

“No there’s honey,” Draco muttered, distracted at first and then he looked up, suddenly furious. “What?!”

“Tea,” Harry muttered, eyes suddenly alight. “That’s how he does it. Or she. Somebody.”

Draco stared at him, insulted fading to something more complex. “Write that down, and then take a nap. Your brain will thank you for it more than you think it will.”

“Is it necessary?” Harry complained, scrawling his note down with his biro nonetheless. TEA, underlined three times and an arrow pointing towards ‘potion’.

“Absolutely. There’s a guest bedroom upstairs, I’ll take you to it and then you will sleep. And only after you’re actually slightly rested are we likely to get anywhere with this. I’ll eliminate the ones that involve fewer than eight people.”

Harry protested a little feebly, but Draco would have absolutely none of it. And deep down, Harry knew the other wizard was right. Books could be dangerous, and some of Draco’s had curses on them that made them too damn dangerous to handle when even slightly impaired.

He only slept an hour. It felt like more, and it felt like far less all at the same time. But he pulled his rumpled clothes back into something resembling ‘tidy’, and headed down the stairs to the library again, where Draco had two books in front of him.

“Narrowed it down that far, does it?”

Draco nodded, staring at them as though they’d both insulted his mother. “The others either stopped at seven, or had strict age limits. I’ve still got the other books out on the other table, in case we’re wrong about Carriger being one of them.”

Harry stared at them. “So what’s in them?”

Draco sighed. “One of them’s meant to be a method for binding a Dementor to doing your bidding.”

“Really?” How would that even work?” Draco rolled his eyes at the question.

“By doing the ritual. Presumably. There’s no record of what happens after, or how to capture the thing in the first place.”

Harry wrinkled his nose. “What’s the other one?”

“The one with the margins notes saying it was a good ‘jape’, but didn’t work.” Draco took in Harry’s slack-jawed expression. “Yes, it says ‘jape’, next to descriptions of how to potion up, then kill and arrange nine bodies. Not everybody who’s ever owned these books is as nice as I am, can we move on now?”

“Nine?”

“Yeah, nine. Who they are doesn’t matter, but what matters is their… wand… stercus.” Draco started laying out the pages, eyes cross-referencing quickly. “Stercus!” he repeated.

“It’s this one?”

“Somebody’s making a useless ritual, yeah. It’s this one. This is why. And the Carriger girl fits in with it too.”

“Wonderful,” Harry said in lieu of saying something a great deal stronger. “I’m going to need to take this one to the office and we’ll go over it there then.”

“Yeah,” Draco agreed, picking it up, and then shuddering. “Damn. No.” He held it with two hands, staring in turns at Harry and at the book in open horror. “I can’t let you take it.”

Harry sighed. “Malfoy, we’ve discussed this on the first day. You were onboard with lending me your books, what precisely has changed in the last five seconds-”

“No, I mean, I literally cannot let you take it. You have to take me with you.” He looked away from the book’s cover in mild horror. “Could you help me get a cloak on?”

Harry stared. “Huh?”

“It’s one of the more enchanted ones, Potter. This has got some rituals that actually work in it, and I didn’t even think before I picked it up.” He shot Harry a look, as though this failing on his part were Harry’s fault. “This is the one I told you not to touch yourself, remember? Now I’ve picked it up with the intention of lending it to another, and now…”

“And… now?” Harry prompted as Draco trailed off.

The blond man sighed, and turned the book upside-down, palm flat. “And now I’ve got to announce quite clearly to it that I’m not leaving it.” The book stayed precisely where it was.  
Attached to his hand.

“Can you floo with that thing attached?” Harry asked, fighting down a wave of nausea. He’d lost all the bones in his arm once, why was having a book attached to Draco Malfoy’s palm an issue for him?

“It’s going to be delightful fun finding out,” Draco sighed. “I’ll tuck my arm and the book under my robes. But I will need help with a cloak.”

*

Fortunately, arriving at the Ministry nearly in the middle of the night meant that there was only one member of the press around to notice their arrival.

“Evening, Buchanan,” Harry called, leading Draco over to the wand registration area. Sometimes it paid to be vaguely friendly to the press, and the journalist had noticed them anyway; he’d started heading towards that floo gate as soon as he heard the telltale thump against the floor that meant Harry Potter had once again made the mistake of using floo as a method of travel.

“Evening, Mister Potter!” Buchanan said cheerily. “Or, well. After midnight, or something.”

“Yeah. Why are you still up?” Harry feigned a yawn he really wasn’t feeling.

“Oh, I’m a bit of an insomniac, sir. And as it’s just gone midnight, that should be Wednesday, not Tuesday on the reg paper, yeah?”

Harry groaned corrected the day on the sheet he was filling in for his side of the paperwork to get Draco into the blocked-from-the-public sections of the building.

“So, bringing in Mister Malfoy. What dastardly scheme’s afoot tonight? Ooh, let me have an in and my editor-”

“Mister Malfoy has a very useful library. We’re borrowing one of his books and he couldn’t let it go without him,” Harry explained quickly. The last thing either of them needed was a ‘Malfoy involved in disappearances’ headline.

Buchanan winced in sympathy. “Oh, one of those spells. I’ve got a few of those types of books at home too. Nasty.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody use the word ‘dastardly’ in a sentence before,” Draco remarked mildly, holding out his wand and taking the receipt.

“It’s a skill sir,” Buchanan answered. “Like saying ‘fracas’.”

“I see,” Draco replied, putting the receipt in his bag one-handed. It looked like a very awkward manoeuvre, but Harry didn’t dare help him. “Shall we, Potter?”

“This way, Draco.”

*

“Daphne, what are you still doing up?”

“Just checking things over si-ir…” Daphne trailed off, looking up and blinking. “Draco.”

“Daphne,” Draco replied evenly; if he was shocked or hurt at seeing his former sister-in-law, Harry thought, he didn’t show it. Harry had had a few nervous moments when he’d needed to work with Arthur for the first few months after the divorce was announced, until Arthur had pointed out that it was probably for the best.

He’d then added that Harry would be well-advised to let the kids do their Christmas and Easter Mornings at the Burrow, to which Harry had quickly agreed.

“Sir, why-”

“I think I’ve got the reference book for you, but it’s one of the ones that I can’t lend out,” Draco said breezily. “Potter, could you help me with this sling?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure.” The sling under the robes had really been the best way to ensure Draco’s arm didn’t get ripped off while travelling by floo, but concentrating on removing it safely wasn’t enough of a distraction from Daphne’s face as she noticed precisely how strongly the book had objected to Draco lending it to anybody.

“Does that… does that hurt?”

“Thankfully, no. It’s bound to make a lot of things difficult, however. And no, you can’t copy this one out.”

“So I was right. What does the ritual do then?” Daphne blinked a few times, suddenly all professional. Harry had often admired that trick in her.

“It’s meant to give people without magic, powers. Squibs or muggle, doesn’t matter. The original author said that this was why muggleborns existed, but the notes I’ve got in this one say that it’s not going to work.”

“You are joking,” Daphne whispered, crowding in to take a look. Draco shot her a look.

“Mind if I sit down, Daffodil? This is going to get to be a heavy book and I think Harry wants to spread some photos and files out around this thing on the table.”

Daphne backed off a little with a muttered apology, while Draco pulled up a chair and Harry transfigured the table around him.

“All right. Let’s get cracking. We’ll add to the team as they come in.”

Draco tapped one finger against the pieces, reading out the wand types in reverse order so they could at least be copied out.

“Hawthorn, Hazel, Holly, Oak, Willow, Alder, Ash, Rowan, Birch.”

Harry nodded. “Birch was killed off first, then we’ve had Rowan, Ash, Alder, Willow, Oak, Holly, and I hate to say it but probably Hazel now. And that just leaves Hawthorn. If whoever it is keeps sticking to this pattern, that’ll be Hawthorn with a Unicorn hair core.”

“This is all well and good, but how precisely does knowing how the victims are being picked help with knowing where he’s getting them from or how?” Daphne asked, sounding annoyed.

Harry jumped back to reality. “Good question Daphne, how far along into that investigation are you?”

She stared, then rolled her eyes and walked away.

“That was what I thought.”

“I don’t suppose you can pull the records and find out who else in London at the moment has this last combination, so you can protect people?”

“I can go do that. I’ll be back soon. There’s a damned Press Conference first thing this morning, which we’ll probably end up having in here anyway.”

“You want me to make myself scarce for that?” Draco offered.

I’ll be in my room, making no noise and pretending I don’t exist, Harry thought and suppressed a shudder. “No, you can probably stay. I think I might work the fact that we know what the ritual is meant to do now, and that it won’t work into the speech.”

“You really think that’s going to stop our killer?” Draco sounded sceptical.

Our killer, Harry thought. “It might.”

*

One press conference. Held in the office.

“What about priori incantatum?” one young witch asked. Harry blinked, trying to work out how somebody could possibly ask that question, then shook his head.

“You can’t cast priori incantatum on a bullet. It’s a muggle weapon; the most we’ll be able to pull is a rifling match if we find the right gun that fired it. I’m informed that we’re lucky it’s a pistol used to perform the kill and not a shotgun – those are untraceable.”

And all pandemonium broke loose.

“Are we dealing with a muggle as the killer here?” the Prophet asked, and Harry shook his head quickly.

“At this point, we’re not ruling anything out, but given the availability levels of the book whoever it is appears to be following, we doubt it. It’s more likely to be a person already living in the magical community.”

“Is Draco Malfoy a person of interest in your case?” was the next most easily discernable question, and that one had to be dealt with right then before it became too big.

Harry raised an eyebrow. “If he were, would I have let him be involved in this conference?” He shook his head. “Mister Malfoy has inherited an extensive library, the contents of which have been exceedingly helpful in locating a motive for these otherwise unconnected killings.”

“Follow up: What’s the motive then?”

Harry looked down at the blond, who was sitting with his hands folded neatly over the book, covering the part where the skin on his wand hand meshed down into the cover without a seam line. “Draco?” he prompted.

Draco opened his eyes and spoke calmly, with none of the charm he usually displayed to those members of the press who’d not been to school with him. “The killer appears to be working off a ritual which promises to gift magic powers to the one who completes it correctly. My copy of this book is rather heavily annotated; whoever is committing these crimes clearly does not have any such notes.” He smiled thinly. “This ritual will not work, but I doubt that such knowledge would prevent the person from making their ninth kill. If they’re following the ritual exactly, this should be the last kill as well.” He glanced down at the book. “This ritual would theoretically be of use to all sentients, though the annotations mention only forcing a muggle, a squib, a witch, and a centaur to kill like this.”

“Forced? So it might work if the person were killing of their own free will? Could we be dealing with a muggle looking to-”

“We don’t think this is a muggle,” Harry interrupted. “If it is, it’s a muggle with access to a severely banned book. Draco Malfoy only has a copy of this book because his family was in possession of it before the laws were changed regarding ritual books, and because it’s not able to leave the confines of his library without Draco or blood member of the Malfoy family in attendance at all times. The book also cannot be copied out from. Memorisation would be called for.”

“How the hell is that enforced?” One voice called out skeptically. Draco leaned around to see the speaker and smiled thinly.

Then raised his hands. His left came away freely, but his right lifted the book off the table with it, and it hung there, open and heavy and straining at Draco’s palm. The skin around it started to turn white with the strain, and Harry winced.

“It should only resolve as a blur on your photographs,” Draco said, as though his hand weren’t trying to rip itself from the book. “All photographs of this moment will need to be turned over to Auror Potter. If any of them survive, that is,” he went on, as there was a humming whine and then a burst of flaming light from the cameras of those photographers who had dared to take a picture.

Another click, and Dennis Creevey’s spare camera, filled with old fashioned muggle film (which the photojournalist sometimes complained loudly was becoming harder and harder to get hold of these days) fell silent. He waved it in apology. “I’ll let you have this one, Harry,” he promised. “I don’t think my readers need to see that shot. Anybody got a sketch going?”

“Me,” Daniel McGrady called. “That’s a little twisted for a library book, Malfoy.”

“It’s a perfectly reasonable precaution,” Draco replied. “This book’s been banned for approximately three hundred years. It’s five hundred years old, and the exceptions only applied to families who’d purchased the first copies when they came out, and hadn’t already removed them from their libraries. This particular curse was on all of the first editions.”

“Which means we’re looking for somebody descended from a line that old, with access to a book like this, who’d want to use it.” Harry tried to regain control of his own damn press conference.

Again. His life. How was his life this?

“What were the Witch’s results in the book, Malfoy?” Buchanan asked.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer not to give further details,” Draco replied smoothly. “I doubt Auror Potter would appreciate it.”

“There is one further detail we would like to give, however.” Harry picked up, giving up on taking control of the conference but still determined to have the last word in it. “We’re issuing an alert to all witches and wizards currently in the greater London area, to be careful. I’m sure Alastor Moody would have said ‘Constant Vigilance’ at this point, and he’d have been right. This warning is in particular aimed at magic users whose wand is made of Hawthorn. No further questions will be accepted at this time. Yes, I can certainly say there’s a public’s right to know more,” Harry held up both hands when some people started to raise their voices in protest. “But if we tell you absolutely everything we know, then we’ll find it harder to catch the real killer.”

There was a pause, then Buchanan raised a hand tentatively. “Why don’t you just look through the official records, to see who might own that particular book?”

“Would that we could,” Susan replied before Harry could stop her. “But one of the things Voldemort did while he was in power was destroy a large number of those sorts of records, in the name of claiming pureblood supremacy over Muggles and Muggleborns.”

Buchanan tossed a triumphant smirk at Harry, who rolled his eyes. “As I’ll assume that Buchanan was attempting to help our investigation there, I will ask all of you, nicely, to not print that? We’d like to maintain the illusion that we know more than we do?”

There were a few grumbles, but finally Harry got the promises he needed out of the room before they filed out. Dennis handed over his camera before he left last.

“Make sure it gets back to me in one piece?” he implored, eyes wide. “And you’ll owe me for the film too.”

Harry poked him in the shoulder, so Dennis poked back good naturedly. “If you’ll ask Susan, she’ll give you a receipt and I’ll sign it for you and everything.”

“Cool, another thing with your autograph on it,” Dennis said drily.

“Jerk.”

“Arse.”

Susan looked between the two of them, and sighed, filling in most of the form herself with a moment’s obvious reverence for the idea of using pens rather than quills in the office. “If you two are quite finished with your mutual admiration societies?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Harry said, signing the receipt quickly. “All good, Dennis?”

“All good.” He looked over at Draco, who was sitting with his hands folded over the book again. “You want to discuss it?”

Huh? “Discuss what?”

“Hey, all I’m saying, is it would make a lot more sense, what with the timings of both your divorces and everything…” Dennis trailed off, raising his eyebrows. Harry frowned at him. What the hell was Dennis getting at?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dennis,” he settled on at last. “Draco’s just helping us with some research.”

“Draco, huh. So, that’s all he’s doing?”

“That’s all he’s doing,” Harry confirmed, and out the corner of his vision, Draco opened his eyes and gave Dennis an appraising look, before he was sidetracked into a quiet conversation with Buchanan. They spoke softly, then Buchanan slipped Draco his card.

“If you say so, Harry. Just saying, right now? Secret’s safe with me and you know it.”

“Er. Thanks?” What?

For absolutely no discernable reason, Dennis walked by Buchanan, slung an arm over his shoulders, and dragged him away from Draco and out the room to the tune of Dennis’s declarations of love for the modern muggle DSLR cameras and how it was a shame they didn’t work around either Hogwarts or the Ministry. Buchanan cast one last look back at Draco as he was led out.

“Well,” Susan remarked as the door closed at last. “That could have gone better.”

“It could have gone far worse,” Draco mumbled. “Thanks for heading that one off, Harry. I didn’t want to deal with the usual round of ‘Evil Malfoys strike again’.”

Harry shrugged, then glared at Susan. “You’re lucky I was able to talk them into not saying anything about that, Bones.”

Susan shot him a look. “Paperwork?”

“Paperwork,” Harry confirmed.

“Even though I make you your teas in the morning?”

“Even though,” Harry agreed. Susan sighed, and headed off to her desk. Harry looked back at Draco. “What did Buchanan want?”

“Have I ever mentioned that being on the Hogwarts Board of Directors is mostly hereditary?” Draco asked, which wasn’t really an answer. This must have shown on Harry’s face, because he went on. “He wanted to talk with me about whether I’d be taking a seat if it was ever offered, and if so, what were my intentions towards squib acceptance within the school. He’d like to talk more about it later.”

“You going to take him up on that?” Draco looked up in mild surprise at the question, and after a moment Harry blinked as well. That had come out a little more strongly than it should have.

Odd.

“I might just do that, Potter. I think we’ve got all we can get from this book?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah. Having it here for the Press Conference was a better move than I thought it was going to be, too.”

Draco narrowed his eyes, but nodded.

“Right then. If it’s all the same to you then, Potter, I’d like to get back home now,” he snapped. “Perhaps work out a way to get this book off me?”

Oh, right.

“Um, yeah,” Harry nodded, and held out a hand to help Draco stand, which the blond promptly ignored. “I’ll take you back to wand reg and get yours back. You could probably do with some extra sleep.”

Draco shrugged, tucking his arm and the book back into the sling and then finally accepting help to get the cloak back on. Funny, he’d actually asked for the help earlier.

It took a surprisingly short time to get the wand back, though in retrospect, they had just completed the morning rush of appointments and early arrivals for other appointments. There was no lineup; Draco merely handed over the receipt reading ‘Malfoy, Draco. 10" Hawthorn/Unicorn Hair’, and pocketed his wand quickly.

“Buchanan? If you could pop around over the floo in, say, three hours? That should be enough time for the curse to wear off, and then we can have that talk?” Draco drawled, pretending Harry wasn’t next to him.

Buchanan shot Harry a look, then nodded. “Noon sounds… absolutely perfect,” he decided. “What’s your floo call?”

Draco smiled, stepping into the permanently green flames. “Malfoy Manor,” he responded, and the fire consumed him quickly.

Buchanan gave Harry a quick grin. “Sorry about that, Auror Potter.”

What was he- Nevermind. “Yeah. I’ll see you around, Buchanan?”

“Oh, undoubtedly.”

*

For no reason Harry could fathom, while it seemed that time flew by until noon, he was acutely aware of each passing second, as though something were trying to work itself out. He stared at the map, at the muggle board with pictures on it, at the wall with the wand list and descriptions on it, at the little ticks beside the list of how each body had been found, the little ticks that matched the book Draco had borne.

There had been a lot of those little ticks.

He picked up the sheet of Ashleigh Carriger’s last movements, both in Muggle and Wizarding London, and tried to work out what was buzzing away in the back of his mind.

He rubbed at his curse scar absently. It didn’t hurt these days, hadn’t hurt in more than half his lifetime now, but the gesture was more habit than anything else by now anyway.

Ginny had hated that habit.

Harry took his glasses off, and gazed back up at his copy of the map again, and that was precisely how DI Sally Bailey found him when she stepped out of his personal floo and into his office.

“How many of the victims visited the Ministry before they died?” she asked, no preamble. Harry blinked, and rather than scrabble at the papers in front of him, he pushed open the door with a burst of wandless and wordless magic.

“Bones!”

“Sir?” Susan called back, almost tentatively.

“How many of the victims visited the Ministry in the, oh say, two weeks before they died?”  
Susan blinked, and dropped her pen in shock, then did as Harry had avoided and scrabbled through the papers in front of her. She looked up in dawning horror.

“All of them,” she breathed. Harry looked up at Bailey, who nodded grimly.

“CCTV picked up all of them visiting the Ministry.”

“Who the hell put CCTV in front of the Ministry?” Harry demanded with rather less heat than he felt like summoning, and Bailey shot him a look.

“That’s what you want to focus on right now?”

“No, you’re absolutely right, that’s not what I want to focus on right now. BONES!”

“Already cross-referencing Hawthorn wands against Ministry visitor lists,” Susan called back, a flurry of paper lifting up around her, pieces swirling away as her spell rejected the information. “Here in the office we’ve got everything from the time Ashleigh Carriger first visited to the time she disappeared, but anything else we’ll need to do more paperwork to acquire. Hawthorn’s not terribly common though, sir.”

Something snapped into place in Harry’s mind, a sudden shuddering moment of shock.

“Draco Malfoy has a Hawthorn wand,” he breathed. “With Unicorn hair.”

Bailey stared. “That’s a bit of a leap, has he been here?”

“Oh, he’s been here all right,” Harry said grimly, grabbing his cloak and the stash of powder from the spot on the mantelpiece. “Susan, we’re going to Draco’s. If we’re not all back in ten minutes, you and everybody available come get us.”

Susan nodded, stepping out of her paperstorm and sending off directional summoning spells for the others with her wand.

Harry threw powder into the fire and grabbed onto Bailey’s arm as he stepped through and yelled. “Malfoy Manor.”

The world spun out to the mess it always did when he was travelling by floo, until he stepped out into the hallway.

The dark hallway, save for the fire glowing merrily green behind them, then fading to red, then orange, then blackened embers. The air felt suddenly chilled, and Harry was instantly reminded of a moment when he’d stood in this building in 1998 and the tide of the war changed in a fistfight.

Auror and Detective shared a glance, and pulled out their wands without a word. Harry checked in all directions first, then cast his patronus deliberately incorporeal and silent.

The mist sped along the ground, the shadow of a fully grown deer seeking Draco, and they followed it along, treading as lightly as they could. Harry cast a questioning glance at Bailey, who shook her head.

So Bailey couldn’t cast a Patronus, but with luck…

There was a cry as the patronus slid under the door, and the sound of a pistol going off in one of the bedrooms upstairs, and Bailey took off running, Harry racing up behind her onto the stairs.  
Bailey got there first, and didn’t so much as pause to cast Alohomora at the door, merely lashed out with her foot at the weak spot inherent in the doorjamb, using her forward momentum to hit it at speed.

The door swung open as Bailey landed awkwardly, and tucked herself into a roll.

“Don’t you move,” Buchanan snarled, holding the pistol at the back of Draco’s neck, right where the other victims had been shot. “I can always get another Hawthorn carrier. I’ve got a whole week to find another. More than a whole week.”

“More than a whole week?” Harry asked. “Buchanan, have you read the notes in Draco’s book? The ritual doesn’t work. I don’t know what you were trying to achieve, but you’re already a Wizard; even if it actually did work, it wouldn’t have any effect on your power levels.”

“Not on mine, no,” Buchanan growled. “But my daughter’s a squib.”

“How do you know that?” Harry yelled. Bailey winced.

“Clearly, you never took any hostage negotiation courses,” she mumbled, starting to come out of the crouch she’d rolled into once she’d hit the door. Buchanan twitched.

“I said don’t move. That applies to both of you.” He tightened his grip on the pistol at Draco’s neck. “She’s nearly nine, she hasn’t shown any sign of being magical yet.”

“That means absolutely nothing,” Harry said, staring at him. “Neville Longbottom didn’t show any signs of magic until he was nearly eleven.”

“She’s a squib, I tell you!” Buchanan yelled out. “But I’ll fix that. All I need is one Hawthorn user dead, then I’ll have all the wood for my fire. My daughter will be able to go to a proper school and learn how to use her new powers. My daughter will be more powerful than you could possibly ima-”

Then Draco’s silently cast ‘petrificus totallus’ caught him.

“Could… One of… you help me move?” Draco half-yawned through chattering teeth, once his assailant had fallen backwards. “Tea… drugged. Doesn’t go well with honey, I think.”

Harry blinked, then darted forward to get the blond away. “How’d you two get into the bedroom?” he asked, then felt rather stupid for asking it. That was not the sort of question an Auror ought to ask first, particularly under the circumstances.

Draco shuddered. “Don’t know. Don’t want to…’mcold? Think he wasn’t going to… kill me for a week though.”

Harry nodded, summoning one of the blankets from the bed while Bailey pulled out a set of muggle handcuffs, bagging and tagging the pistol before the wand on autopilot.

So this was how Susan and her team burst in to find them.

“I’ll get Draco to St. Mungos,” Harry said, bundling the other wizard up in more blankets. “One of you get samples of that tea and meet me there to give to the Healers. Draco’s is the one with honey in it. Greengrass?”

“Sir?” Daphne replied, tearing her eyes up and away from where she’d been staring at Harry’s arms around Draco over the blankets.

“You’re in charge of searching Buchanan’s house. Tamworth, you take lead on his office. We still need to find Ashleigh Carriger, and if I’m right, she’ll still be alive. Let’s give her Dad some good news.”

And at that, Draco’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he collapsed in Harry’s grip.

*

In a perfect world, Harry Potter would not have been faced with a serious pile of paperwork welcoming him back to his office when he returned from St Mungos. But whoever had said it was better to ask forgiveness than permission, had never come across the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Magic. For all that the Carriger girl wouldn’t have been found – and found she was, potioned to the eyeballs, starving, but alive and otherwise unharmed in the cellars of Buchanan’s house, to his wife’s utter horror.

There was blood on the floor around her, and initial bloodspatter analysis had been ‘head shot spray, multiple’ from the technician called to the scene.

This was not, however, a perfect world.

The prosecutions clerk had stared at the initial arrest form sheet in horror, then back up at Harry, then back down again. “Much… though it pains me to say this, Auror Potter,” he said hesitantly, “but I’m afraid that even though you and your team have saved a young student’s life today, and everything else that’s occurred, you did actually…” the clerk gulped, then went on. “Need more paperwork than this.”

Which was why Harry staggered out of his office again after eleven that night. He’d taken the paperwork on himself while the others had gone out for a celebratory drink.

He didn’t want them to see him shaking at how close they’d come to failing.

The small hall-clock chimed twelve when Harry walked into the entrance of St Mungos. He blinked a few times in mild surprise; he could have sworn he’d had every intention of going home to change and sleep, yet here he was. And since he was here…

“Draco Malfoy?” Harry asked. Ashleigh Carriger was in an intensive care ward, her father two levels up in Muggle Disease care, but Draco would surely have been moved out of there to a private room by now.

“Four one nine, sir,” the young healer behind the desk said. “In the Mismanaged Potions ward. Would you like a guide-light?”

Harry nodded, as he’d never been near the Mismanaged Potions ward before now. Most times if he was visiting, he wound up in Curse Damage. The clerk waved his wand, and a small blue light hovered in front of Harry, flickering a little.

“Just follow it along, sir,” the healer said kindly. Harry shrugged, and did, yawning slightly as he went.

The light flickered out in front of a door otherwise identical to all the others Harry had walked past in the last ten minutes, so he pushed open the door and shut it again behind him leaving the room in the kind of gloom that only the kind of starlight you just couldn’t see in Muggle London could provide.

There was a comfortably squashy looking armchair in the corner beside Draco’s bed, so Harry sat down, toed off his shoes, and promptly fell asleep.

*

Harry jolted awake, raising his wand automatically to the sound of somebody trying to be overly quiet and failing entirely. The world around him was blurry and lop-sided, but he could deal with that later. Right now-

“You look ridiculous, Harry,” Draco whispered. “Straighten your glasses. How long have you been here?”

“Um.” Harry paused, cracking a yawn and stretching out kinks he wasn’t aware he’d been nursing in his back and shoulders. “Since about midnight?” he tried.

Draco snorted. “Well, that was exciting yesterday, wasn’t it. Let’s never do that again. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“So, why are you here?” Draco asked. “Bit early for a… what’s the word? Debrief?”

Harry shrugged, then winced. He’d need to see a healer himself at this rate. “What, me? No, I’m just here to make sure you’re all right.”

Draco gave him an odd look, then away to the ceiling.

“Really?” He sounded disbelieving.

“Really,” Harry replied. “So. Now that the case is over – and we found the girl, by the way – I guess what I’d really like to say is ‘thank you’. Is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?”

Draco hummed for a moment, then nodded carefully. “All right.” He shifted over as much as it looked like it might be safe for him to do. “Answer me a question.”

“Sure,” Harry replied easily.

“Tell me with all the honesty I know you have in you, why you and Ginerva Weasley divorced.”

Harry narrowed his eyes. “Any question but that. That’s a private matter, Draco. You tell me why you and Astoria Greengrass did the same and then maybe I might consider discussing it.” That ought to give him pause; Draco Malfoy and Astoria Greengrass had been notoriously reticent about discussing their separation, even more so than Harry and Ginny had been. Still were, in fact. “Why do you want to know, anyway?”

Draco smiled easily, and Harry wondered if perhaps his brush with death had loosened Draco’s tongue, or if it might have been the potion, or something else. “We finalised it last year, just after you went public. Truth told, we hadn’t realised we were drifting apart until we realised that I was sleeping more and more often where I was, rather than come to bed. Then we realised that she was going out of her way to avoid me in the daytime too, and it all sort of… expanded outwards from that point.”

Draco tipped his head up to look at the stars visible through the window before he went on. “Anyway. When you and Ginevra… I thought about how… if the couple who were perfect for each other were falling out of love like that. How it was… it was all right, for me to have fallen out of love with Tori the way we had fallen out of love with each other. You know?”

“Um. Not really.”

“Why’d you leave her, Harry?” Draco repeated, his words starting to slur a little, and Harry looked up at the stars with him.

“I realised that we were two very different people. Who were too alike.” He looked at Draco out the corner of his better eye, and decided to trust him. “We both had a piece of Voldemort’s soul in us, at one stage or another of our lives. And… yeah, we’d been together for twenty years. But we were both waking up every morning and staring at each other and… and I used to think ‘I married a woman who shares my life experiences’. But towards the end, she told me that she woke up and thought ‘I married a man whose soul was as damaged as mine, because after I had a crush I saw me in him’. And as always, she was right.”

“You both were,” Draco started, but Harry shook his head.

“She was right. I married her because she came from a large family full of people who… even if they didn’t always care about each other the way I’ve learned other families do, they knew they could depend on each other. I married a woman who had shared her soul with Voldemort, just as I had. I married a woman braver than I, and I didn’t deserve her.”

“Yeah, you do deserve her-”

“Sharing a soul with Voldemort messed me up a bit more.”

“Do I deserve no love because my soul is tainted from taking a mark I never wanted?”

Harry looked at him in surprise. “Draco, that’s absurd, of course you deserve-”

“Then you deserve the same. Don’t lie to yourself to say otherwise.” The blond lowered his head, looked him in the eye. “I’ve had a little longer to come to terms with this, Harry. I know what I’m talking about here.” He reached out, and took hold of Harry’s hand. “I know that sometimes, what we think we want, isn’t what we want, it’s just what the people around us expect us to want. And sometimes… sometimes, the things we really want are right in front of us, and we’re too scared to see it.”

Harry blinked, then looked down at Draco’s hand in his, a glimmer of understanding dawning. ”I think we might be talking about two different things now, Draco,” he murmured, but didn’t take his hand away.

“Are we, Harry?” Draco countered. Harry thought about that a while longer, then shook his head.

“Maybe we’re not,” he conceded. They looked up again, at the slowly brightening sky.

A Thursday morning, without a body to be found somewhere in London.

“New day?” Draco asked, squeezing his hand absently, his grip weak. Harry looked back down at him.

“Yeah. Brand new day.”


End file.
